Volume 24 Number 1 - January 2017

Features

Editor’s note: This is the first in a two-part Sportsman Boat Showcase. Next month, top aluminum boats will be featured.

Fishing boats are different animals to different fishermen. The same boat won’t work across the spectrum of lakes, inland rivers, coastal rivers, coastal backwaters, the inshore ocean or gulf and the offshore bluewater.

Crappie fishermen who live in North Carolina are too far from Lake Grenada, Miss., or Reelfoot Lake in western Tennessee to regularly visit those hot spots.

But they do have Jordan Lake —and it doesn’t make much difference when you visit this 14,000-acre impoundment of the Haw River and New Hope Creek. It is, by most accounts North Carolina’s best fishery for black crappie in terms of size and numbers of fish.

Just as the sun was starting to climb above the horizon, we drove through the countryside looking for Canada geese. The season was opening in a couple of days, and we were out scouting for places to hunt.

There’s a time and place for everything, things to think about for just about any endeavor, including the search for trophy fish. For anglers looking to target trophy striped bass, the time is now, and the place is most certainly South Carolina’s Lake Richard Russell.

Guide Dale Collins and anglers Rocky Carter of Swansboro, N.C., and John Moon of Graham, N.C., were casting 3-inch mullet chunks on Carolina rigs toward the churning surf. Within seconds, each angler was hooked up with an over-slot red drum that made rods bend and drags squeal. After battles that often took 10 minutes each, they released dozens of these broad-shouldered bronze fish.

South Carolina fishermen can find plenty of cold-weather sheepshead action off the Mount Pleasant Pier, including good numbers and hefty sizes — if you know how to catch them and don’t mind cold weather.

Deer hunting is one of the most-popular forms of outdoor recreation; its roots run deep in the Carolinas. Through modern technology and the availability of information — much through the social-media explosion — deer hunters are carrying out a new vision that is enhancing the herd.